CONVICTION

Journey: “The movie never ends/it goes on and on and on and on.” Motley Crue: “You know that I’ve seen/too many romantic dreams/up in lights/fallin’ off the silver screen.” Poison: “At the drive-in, in the old man’s Ford/behind the bushes, till I’m screamin’ for more.” Rock pays homage because rock gets it: the movies, like rock, are big, they don’t trade in those bargain-basement feelings like “satisfaction in a job well done” or “belatedness.” Time was one could speed fucking fast down Prospect Park West until one reached the theater/circle, then they put in that bike lane and yeah, sure, but it’s a whole lot harder to get your yellow light on around here.

Swank—not theater five (though it is) but the actress. Funny, I know a little boy named Oscar, I wonder if she’d like to meet him. It’s based on a true story, though I’d make the subtle point that if it were entirely real the Massachusetts accents would, well, they’d just be the way people talk. She puts herself through law school to argue against the verdict laid on brother Sam Rockwell, innocent of murder if not of the youthful trespasses through which they’d together dreamt of escape, not of unpredictable violence and excessive joyous hoots. A father. Where else can you stick ‘em, no one knows what to do with them, what’s a prison for, anyway? The DNA that exonerates him, finally, also damns him, passed on to daughter Mandy, a Leo—watch out.

The impassive face of the Law, struck at, may blink, quick as a shutter over a lens. So how fast can we move? And where hide, on a barren plain that extends to every horizon? The movie ends—reversal, he goes free, hugs daughter, thanks sis, cut to a photo of the actual siblings, statistics about the wrongly convicted. But no mention of what I heard on the radio—that six months later he was struck by a random car and killed. That they don’t tell you this! That we might sense it, instead, and understand we have but thought ourselves unblinking, when we've been too much and too often like children spared.